


A Waste of the Best

by Halfblood_Fiend



Series: Fictober 2019 [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, post adamant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-22 18:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21306380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Halfblood_Fiend/pseuds/Halfblood_Fiend
Summary: Keram Adaar mourns the loss of Warden Loghain after the Siege at Adamant Fortress, and Knight-Captain Rylen tries his best to comfort her without getting burned.
Relationships: Adaar/Rylen, Female Inquisitor/Rylen, Inquisitor/Rylen
Series: Fictober 2019 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1536041
Kudos: 3
Collections: Fictober19





	A Waste of the Best

**Author's Note:**

> Day 4 : "I know you didn't ask for this."

Rylen hadn’t seen Keram for some time now. She’d gone missing somewhere in the afternoon, but her horse was still tied with the rest so he surmised that she couldn’t have gone far. Probably took a walk. The horned lass liked her time to herself and maybe needed it bad after Adamant. Maker knew he could use a breather himself, but there was always plenty shit to do. Best to let the Inquisitor have her peace.

So he took up looking after their sizable entourage to Skyhold. Between him and Commander Cullen, it was easy. Just like old times in Kirkwall. Only with fewer abominations and less bloody madness. 

But as the sun set over the Orlesian treetops and the first moon made its slow ascent over the Inquisition encampment, Rylen finally let himself get worried.

“You haven’t seen the Inquisitor, have you?”

“I haven’t.” Cullen looked up from his papers at Rylen and glanced around the tents as though Rylen hadn’t been doing the same fucking thing himself for hours. Together, they shuffled to the front of the ration line. It had been a hell of a lot longer earlier, but they had been too busy to stop. Now, the camp cook was already handing Cullen his share and filling the next bowl. “It was my understanding that looking after Keram was sort of _your_ job now.”

“Har, har.”

Rylen eyed the steaming venison stew with the large roast potatoes in Cullen’s bowl and rubbed his face with one hand. Andraste’s ass, he was tired. And he wanted very badly to eat, to retire with Cullen to his tent, and maybe get slobbering drunk for good measure, but he couldn’t leave Keram out wherever she was. Not with a clear conscience.

The cook offered him a helping, and with a sigh, Rylen declined.

“Guess it’s time to do my job then,” he muttered. Rylen waved goodbye to Cullen and marched away from the welcoming smells of food and fires.

His stomach was very fucking unhappy with his chivalry.

So. Where could she have gone? If he was a tired, cranky, horned giantess, where would _he _go?

“She’s gone where she thinks it won’t hurt,” Cole said, suddenly appearing at Rylen’s elbow.

“Maker’s balls, Cole!” Rylen swore, leaping back and clutching his chest. “You’ll kill a man like that!”

“Sorry.” The boy dipped his head and his pale face disappeared beneath the wide brim of his patchwork hat.

“What do you mean, ‘she went where she thinks it won’t hurt’? She’s not…” Maker, he couldn’t even finish that sentence in his mind.

Cole’s eyes widened and his gaze snapped back up to Rylen’s. “No! No. I just… I followed her to see if I could help, though she usually doesn’t want my help. But this time… She hurts so loud and so hot. She seems very mad.”

Rylen chewed his lip. He’d had a hunch that Keram was hurting all through their slog across the countryside. Nay, ever since she returned with Hawke and her team and not Loghain. She’d been too close to the Warden to not be. Aye, Rylen knew, but he’d been too cowardly to do anything about it. Keram was seething throughout the whole trip, and Rylen never asked why.

_What a sorry excuse for a partner you are, Rylen._

“Take me to her.”

Cole led Rylen much further from the camp than he would have thought Keram would wander but then stopped so suddenly at a sharp embankment that Rylen nearly bowled into him and knocked them both over the steep slope.

The boy didn’t seem to notice. “There.” Cole whispered, pointing out the way. “Through the ravine. She needs your help now, not mine.”

_Don’t like the sound of that,_ Rylen thought as he thanked him and picked his way through the brush down the embankment.

A few steps closer and he could hear the rush of water. When Rylen ducked into the ravine, the roar became _all _he could hear. Then the path widened and opened up into a dimly lit glade with a shining, clear pool of water being fed by the small waterfall responsible for all that bloody racket. Hadn’t been here for a sodding minute and the spray was already forming droplets of water on his armor.

_Damn, that’ll bloody rust,_ Rylen thought, brushing the metal plate as he squinted in the gloom looking for Keram.

Then the whole place lit up as a fireball whizzed past his head and exploded in the rock behind him.

Rylen dropped to the ground and drew his sword before he realized what was happening and rational sense could tell him that there could only be _one _person responsible for that.

“Come to slay me, _Basvaarad_?” Keram sneered. “Or will you just drag me back in chains to wither away in your Circles?”

Rylen spun towards the direction of her voice and found the vision herself crouched on a rock, naked and sopping wet, with a new flame ready and jumping in her hand. She looked like a feral thing, hackles raised and ready to strike. Rylen didn’t think she’d ever looked at him like that, like one of those sods she wouldn’t think twice about putting down. It stung in a way he couldn’t quite name.

_But it’s your own fault,_ he told himself. Even though he’d been a soldier for so long it was second nature, Rylen cursed himself for reacting, for putting her on edge. He should have bloody known better. He should have seen this coming.

_He should have known how to treat an angry mage._

Shaking the thought from his head, Rylen stood slowly. He sheathed his sword and held up his hands to her, swallowing any thrum of lyrium that wanted to burst to life. He refused to threaten her any more than he already had. “You know I’d never do that to you, lass. It would be a bloody crime putting you in a place like that. Besides, haven’t you heard? They don’t exactly exist anymore.”

“If only your Chantry could hear that kind of blasphemous talk.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have, the sticky predicament he was in, but he found it too fucking funny. That she would still think, after all this, that he gave two single shits about what the Chantry thought… He laughed. Bitter. Hollow. Maybe he had never quite believed like the other boys and he was always only looking for a way out of the family business, but he certainly didn’t care for the Chantry now.

Not if it would deny him _her_.

“Something funny?” Keram hissed, low and dangerous like a sand viper.

_“Fuck the Chantry, _Keram,” Rylen said with feeling. “You think that if I cared about them, I’d be here? I only care about the Inquisition and what they stand for. And now? Honestly, lass, I now I mostly only care about _you_. If all I was was a Chantry dog, I’d be dead by now. Or _worse_.“ It occurred to him that he could have been like those beasts they hunted in the Approach if he had stayed with the Order. Would the red lyrium have been forced on him if he hadn’t joined the Inquisition? Worse, would he have taken if willingly?

Keram’s lip curled and with a shout she hurled the fireball, not at him, like he assumed, but at the pool. With a high-pitched hiss the fire hit the water and curled away into a cloud of steam.

“Not that I’m not glad that wasn’t in my face, lass, but—”

“It’s a fool’s errand, caring for me. You can ask Warden Loghain how that sentimentality worked out for him.”

Rylen opened his mouth to speak but Keram barreled on.

“All those Wardens at Adamant,” she said scornfully, “How were they all so damn stupid? Loghain wanted to make things right—_he was the only one with some sense, Shokrokar. _But now he’s gone_… _because _of them_!” A new fireball leapt to life in her hands, this one crashing against the rock wall opposite them. “I never cared about any of this shit! I never cared about your stupid war for magic or the damn sky! I just…want to make things right. And all your foolish Orders and Circles and Emperors squabble and bicker while the world unravels… I am _trapped_ here because _no one else _is willing to _do anything!” _The next fireball crashed into the waterfall, throwing a shower of droplets into the air. “Loghain was going to do something… and now he’s dead. What a _waste.”_

Once he realized Keram wasn’t cross with him at all, Rylen’s brain whirred to try and catch up. Cole was certainly right. She was hurting and she was _mad_.

Breathing hard through her nose, Keram curled around herself and rested her chin on her knees. She stared angrily at the water, seething and stewing. Cole had said she needed him now, but Rylen could hardly tell what she needed him for besides maybe target practice.

He approached her rock and the giantess didn’t move. He leaned against it and she didn’t look at him. _Do something, you sod! _Rylen hoisted himself onto the rough stone, settling himself close to Keram and he still didn’t get a face full of fire. In fact, once he was next to her, she dropped her head to his shoulder.

“Loghain was the best of that whole sorry lot,” she murmured, her voice thick.

Rylen momentarily recalled the man who he’d known so little yet heard so much of. Maybe he had given him good advice as far as Keram was concerned, but Loghain Mac Tir had also killed hundreds of people, started a civil war, tried to have his opponents poisoned, and sold men and women into slavery, just to name a precious few of the countless atrocities he committed as Regent during the Fifth Blight in Ferelden. ‘The best of the lot’ was not the way Rylen might have described him, but instead, he said, “Aye, lass. He was. I am so sorry for your loss.”

“It wasn’t just _my_ loss! I am used to losing things, that’s not new. A leader like that is a loss to the entire Inquisition! I am tired of sending useful people to their deaths while spineless worms like Gaspard roam free. We need people of action, not pomp and circumstance.”

Rylen chuckled darkly. “Is this a bad time to remind you that _you_ chose to let Gaspard live? _And_ you gave him the Empire?”

“It is,” she growled.

“Look, lass…” Rylen turned his face to press a kiss to Keram’s forehead. For a half-second, he wondered if he would be thrown off for it, but the giantess remained snug and warm against him. “I know you didn’t ask for all this, but you’ve been navigating the whole Inquisitor thing better than most would have. Maker knows I wouldn’t have the patience for it. Not for the parties or the damned diplomacy… I don’t think I could even do Commander Cullen’s job! But you? You’re the most capable leader we could have hoped for. And I think Warden Loghain would have thought so too. Why else would the legendary ‘Hero of the River Dane’ have followed _you_ into battle?”

“Because he was also the ‘Traitorous Teyrn’ and had nothing else to lose by following an oxman to his death.”

“Well, now, hold on.”

“Still,” Keram sighed over Rylen, “leaving a skilled general in the Fade was just as wasteful as sitting here moping about it is. There is no time for such weakness.”

With that, Keram rose in one fluid movement and leapt to the ground like a cat.

“It’s not weakness,” Rylen reminded her with a frown. “It’s grief. We lost many good soldiers in that siege. It’s not weakness to grieve for any of them, Loghain included.”

“We can argue the semantics if you wish,” Keram said as she picked her clothes up from another stone and pulled them on, “but I have no time for weakness or grieving. Perhaps when I have finished tearing Corypheus’ still-beating heart from his body with my teeth, I will find the time to grieve for Loghain.”

**Author's Note:**

> Ngl, this may end up in A Qunundrum. It's a good scene with good examples of Keram's personality. I barely edited it, so I must still be really happy with it.


End file.
